The shark whisperer (video)

 

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The pandemic and working lives

 

In the future, many papers will be written on how the covid-19 pandemic transformed the nature of work. As millions of employees have relocated to living rooms and kitchen tables, many are already foreseeing the death of the office, a new era of flexible timetables and mass exoduses from cities. Meanwhile workers’ daily routines are different in many ways and do not add up to a golden age of white-collar liberation.

Take modern office routine: meetings, emails and time spent at work. According to a recent Harvard Business School study covering more than 3m people in 16 cities in America, Europe and the Middle East, employees have been attending more meetings—by video conference, rather than in person—sending more emails and putting in more hours since the widespread shift to home-working in March. They found that, compared with pre-lockdown levels, the number of meetings an average worker attends is 13% higher (see chart). The number of people in the average meeting has risen too, by 13.5%, perhaps because video conferences, unlike office-bound ones, are not constrained by space. One ray of hope is that meetings are shorter, by about 20%, or 12 minutes, on average. The trend is most marked in Brussels, Oslo and Zurich.

Does the lack of a commute at least mean workers have more time to themselves? Unfortunately, no, the researchers find.

Across all 16 cities, on average, people work an extra 48.5 minutes a day—more than the average commuting time in America or Europe. The true figure for working hours may be higher. NordVPN, a virtual-private-network provider, reckoned in April that workdays are an average of three hours longer.

Did you finish reading this? Good. Don’t you have a meeting to get to?

From The Economist (edited)

The gym-prohibition era (audio)

 

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The Tower of London guards (captions)

After more than half a millennium guarding the Tower of London from rebellions and invaders, Beefeaters are facing redundancies for the first time because visitor numbers have plummeted due to the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Officially called Yeoman Warders and instantly recognizable with their distinctive red and blue hats and uniforms, the Beefeaters live with their families inside the fortress which houses the Crown Jewels, glittering symbol of the British monarchy.

Historic Royal Palaces, which manages the Tower along with Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace and other sites says it is facing a 124-million dollars hole in its finances due to the closure of their six sites for almost four months.

"We simply have no choice but to reduce our payroll costs," said Barnes. "We urgently need the public to support us by visiting our sites now they have re-opened."

The Tower of London is its largest paid-for attraction and normally attracts around 3 million visitors per year. The site reopened on July 10 but can now welcome fewer than 1,000 people each day due to new safety measures.

Historic Royal Palaces estimates tourism will not fully recover until 2023-2024.

The Tower of London, founded by William the Conqueror after his famous victory at Hastings in 1066 nearly a thousand years ago, is a symbol of English royal power, wealth and terror. For centuries it acted variously as a fortress, a magnificent lodging and a prison to torture and execute enemies of the state.

There are currently 37 Yeoman Warders, a unit created by the founder of the Tudor dynasty Henry VII in 1485 as personal guard. Henry's son, Henry VIII, decreed that some of them would stay and guard the Tower permanently.

From USNews (edited)

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